The Heart Of Man Does Not Tolerate

Our Firmest Convictions Are Apt To Be The Most Suspect; They Mark Our Limitations And Our Bounds. Life Is A Petty Thing Unless It Is Moved By The Indomitable Urge To Extend Its Boundaries.

This Is The Gravest Danger That Today Threatens Civilization: State Intervention; The Absorption Of All Spontaneous Social Effort By The State, That Is To Say, Of Spontaneous Historical Action, Which In The Long Run Sustains, Nourishes, And Impels Human Destinies.

The Metaphor Is Perhaps One Of Man's Most Fruitful Potentialities. Its Efficacy Verges On Magic, And It Seems A Tool For Creation Which God Forgot Inside One Of His Creatures When He Made Him. All Our Faculties Keep Us Within The Realm Of The Real, Of What Is Already There. The Most We Can Do Is To Combine Things Or Break Them Up. The Metaphor Alone Furnishes An Escape; Between The Real Things, It Lets Emerge Imaginary Reefs, A Crop Of Floating Islands.

Man's Being Is Made Of Such Strange Stuff As To Be Partly Akin To Nature And Partly Not, At Once Natural And Extranatural, A Kind Of Ontological Centaur, Half Immersed In Nature, Half Transcending It.

What Makes A Nation Great Is Not Primarily Its Great Men, But The Stature Of Its Innumerable Mediocre Ones.